After a seemingly interminable flight from Arizona on Wednesday, we arrived around midnight and crashed in Manchester, NH. After getting our car in the morning, we drove the 2.5 hours to get to the Roger’s Campground in Lancaster in the fabled North Country in New Hampshire. We arrived at the campground after checking in to our hotel.
Libertarian Woodstock lay before me. They estimate that nearly 1000 folks attended the festival this year.
I got to meet old friends and made new friends. Boston T. Party and I hung together most of the weekend. We have been to several events together and use these interregnums to catch up on what has transpired since we last saw each other. Boston has just published a 15 year revision to Hologram of Liberty (1997) and I urge everyone to get a copy if you are still drinking the Constitutional Kool-Aid or merely wanted to peruse the revised and updated book.
In the morning I had a long interview with Ernie Hancock and the usual crossing of rhetorical swords he so enjoys. I then introduced Angela Keaton for her Talking to Normals about War speech. She is such a stud and antiwar.com is the first page on the ‘net I visit every morning.
I chaired the Resistance and Rebellion panel on Friday afternoon with Adam Kokesh, F. Paul Wilson, Boston T. Party and Pete Kofod (an SF alumnus I dragooned onto the panel). We had a terrific discussion of peaceful and violent means in historical revolution and what the future may hold. Wilson wrote the seminal science fiction novel Enemy of the State about the non-violent destruction of an empire at the hands of the fictional LaNague Federation.
All videos for these events will be available soon on the internet.
I gave the keynote speech on secession in the evening and that went rather well with a lengthy question and answer session afterwards.
I have to mention that as a speaker, we were given the red carpet treatment to include a VIP tent with an unlimited open bar where I consumed vast quantities of alcohol throughout the weekend and feel this further clarified and distilled my thinking. The President of the NH Free State Project, Carla Gericke, treated us like royalty.
On Saturday, I chaired the Ethical Anarchy panel with Stefan Molyneux, Dan D’Amico and Ernie Hancock. Stefan wooed the audience with his crystal clear thinking and sonorous voice (it is almost as if he is classically trained). Dan is a tattooed and burly economics professor from Loyola that is a tenured individualist anarchist in a major university. Send more! Ernie was just as funny and bombastic as always.
More radio interviews in the evening and then we departed for Manchester on Sunday morning. I did make sure to tell the TSA drone not to touch my flashlight when I opted for the security grope.
In the main speaking tent throughout the events they had an ad hoc restaurant that actually had a paleo diet menu so I was able to gorge on all the right things even though we did make our way to a great steakhouse in Lancaster one evening. This is where I discovered that Boston is a dead ringer for Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers films as he entertained us with his eerily close analogs to Mike Myers’ dialogues.
Many folks camped and either simply slept there or had business activities or meetings at their respective campsites. All manner of mind altering substances were available to anyone who wished to imbibe.
What struck me here was that there was a minarchist minority in a sea of anarchist and stateless adherents. Carla says that when PorcFest first started the minarchist meme ruled but that is no longer the case. I suspect that year by year more and more humans are going to understand that the next step in a proper philosophical evolution is self-ownership and the disposal of all manner of slavery.
It gives me hope as an abolitionist that so many are starting to see that being ruled by so few for so little in return for chains and fetters may not be the proposition they bargained for.
My friend Chris mentioned to me that all the campsites for PorcFest in June 2012 were booked as early as September 2011 so if you intend on attending in 2013, it may be prudent to book ahead of time.
Go. You will be surrounded by like-minded folks for whom freedom is the answer. They come in all shapes and sizes and flavors of lifestyle. There was a fork in the road in the early sixties of the last century where the hippies could go left to collectivism or right to individualism. That culture went left. This culture is headed in the other direction.
If I am still in the US, I plan on attending next year.
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Angela Keaton is a hoot. I once spoke to her at length over the phone a number of years ago.
The tragedy is that there are so, so many sheep quietly gnawing at the grass while the wolves circle in packs from every direction. I am struggeling to awaken one ewe, but she simply sees me as a conspiricy theorist.